ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Meditations on the Cross by the Fr. Gerald Beauchamp before the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, 21st March 2008
'Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality'

Introduction

In his poem Burnt Norton T. S. Eliot remarks that 'humankind cannot bear very much reality'. This is surely true of the crucifixion. It's ghastly. It's unbearable. The thought of a man dying naked in public strung up by an unholy alliance of church and state and abandoned by most of his friends is horrendous. So before the liturgy begins this Good Friday perhaps we can look at the cross 'slant': see it in and through three characters whose lives and 'deaths' (or at least their ends) are intimately bound up with this day. In the next hour I'm going to talk about Peter, Mary and Judas.

Peter

Peter was a man's man. He was a worker, a fisherman. He could be tender (watching the healing of his mother-in-law). He was more a man of conviction ('You are the Christ, the Son of God' Mt 16. 16). He was a man of action: (beholding the Transfiguration he responds by wanting to build booths - huts [Mt. 17. 4]). He was also needy ('Lo, we have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have?' Mt 19. 27). He was quick to walk on water and quick to sink (Mt 14. 28-33). He was tempestuous (at the Last Supper wanting not only his feet washed but his head and his hands, too). In Gethsemane, he slept. And he fell at the last hurdle. We don't know if Peter ever laughed but we certainly know that he cried.

Peter, the man's man has man's mans' faults. He is man. He's all of us. All of us are a mixture of light and shade; idealists whose ideals sometimes crumble; people of action who have a tendency to flounder. We can all crack under pressure. It's easy to be caught up in situations we don't understand and with people we can't control. We cannot bear very much reality.

But this man Peter is someone that Jesus knows; knows through and through. He knows him so well that he renames him. Jesus gives Simon a new name: Peter 'the Rock', the rock on which he builds his church. We wouldn't be human if we didn't like our rocks to be solid. We want to know where we stand. We like a firm foundation. We all crave certainty. But cravings are not always to be given into. There can be a lust for certainty that is decidedly unhealthy. It can lead us into a dogmatism that brooks no opposition; that sees no counter opinion; that makes no space for an alternative view.

Peter's denial of Our Lord not just once or twice but three times takes us into the realm of the dangerously human. It takes us into our fears; where rocks split and earth quakes; the place where our courage fails; the place where we are at our most vulnerable; to our own nakedness; to our own cross.

But this day, this Good Friday, isn't a day for wallowing. The cross does not stand alone, at least not any more. It did on that great day around 2000 years ago but since its first anniversary Christians have seen it silhouetted against a strange light, a halo, a hallowed light, a holy light. Something dawned on humanity; some 're-birthing' took place; something which transformed shame into glory. Beyond the cross Peter who denied Jesus three times would be asked three times 'Do you love me?' and three times he would answer 'yes'.

'What will survive of us is love' said the poet Philip Larkin. If our failings and our fallings, our denyings and our weepings contain a grain of love then we can look at the cross. We can bear it. For it is bearing us.

To St. Peter by Tom Donlon
(originally published inCommonweal, 9 March 2001)

The cock crowed
as you denied all
and let them all deride Him
while you fled
to hide.

You abode still
in your lie
as they spiked Him
to a tree
stripped
and hoisted up for all
to see.

The cock crowed;
still
you kept aside
and let them all
divide Him
flesh from life.
Aye, Peter,
ill from the load of your lie
you wept
and he bled dry
from crown and side.

And I, bowed,
do hide,
for daily my
briny will
salts His side.

Mary

The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is one of the wonders of the Italian Renaissance. This small chapel is decorated floor to ceiling with frescoes by Giotto. There are three tiers of paintings. The lower two depict scenes from the life of Our Lord. Those along the top depict scenes from the life of Our Lady.

Her life echoes that of her Son. An angel announces his birth to Mary. So there's an annunciation to St Anne, the mother of Mary. He is born; so is she. Their lives intermingle. But at each intersection what happens to Mary is a paler imitation of what happens to Jesus. So at the Annunciation to Mary the angel appears to her 'full frontal'; in the Annunciation to St Anne the angel half appears through a window.

The dual act of Mary and Jesus reached its artistic climax is Michaelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's in Rome where the Mary holding the dead Christ looks so young that she could almost be his sister.

Mary. Mary is told when she and Joseph present him in the temple that a sword is to pierce her own heart also. But this piercing doesn't happen only at the crucifixion. There's a lot of piercing as Jesus grows to maturity and begins his ministry. There's his being lost after a visit to the temple. Mary and Joseph remonstrate with him when they find him but 'Did you know that I must be about my father's business?' he asks. Apparently not and they must have felt pretty small.

At the wedding in Cana of Galilee Jesus addresses his mother as 'Woman'. However much we try and dress this up it's an unusual form of address and although it wasn't meant to be as rude as we would sound calling our mothers 'woman' in English it does indicate a degree of distance, even severance that must have been very painful for her.

Once Jesus became popularthe crowds were overwhelming. Mary and the family came to try and persuade him to come home. They couldn't get into the house where he was because of the large number of people. 'Your mother and brothers and sisters are here', Jesus was told. His answer? 'Who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters?' Again, distance; severance. Indeed, Jesus may have preferred the company of his adopted and unconventional second family of Mary, Martha and Lazarus at Bethany to his own kith and kin.

But however much he moved away from his mother Mary did not move away from her son. And so we have the touching image in John's Gospel of Our Lady at the foot of the cross with the Beloved Disciple. Unlike the other gospels John only mentions Mary twice: at the wedding in Cana and at the foot of the cross. She's there at the beginning and there at the end. Cana was her alpha: the cross was her omega.

Mary at the foot of the cross: what an agony! Jesus endured excruciating pain - physical (the nails), emotional (deserted by most of his friends) and spiritual ('My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?') but it is Mary who bears a form of suffering that Jesus could not undergo but which is part of the human condition. Mary watches over someone she loves suffer and die. Saviour he may be but she could save him. She could never save him from himself and she can't save him now.

To watch beside someone we love and know that we cannot save them, to know that we cannot relieve their agony, to know that we cannot prevent their death is to have our hearts pierced, torn, wrenched.

Yet for us as we undergo life's crucifixions we can surely take heart, look to her courage as an example. Mary bore much reality. She bore all reality. She bore the incarnate Word: reality itself; the Creator of reality made flesh. She contemplates the most depraved reality of what human beings can do to each other as she sees him bleed. But she also knows that goodness is primal and that evil is secondary. She knows that love is strong and hate is merely brittle. She knows that death is weaker than life. She knows that darkness is shooed away by light. She stood when Peter and Judas fell. The Mary that we see this day is wonderfully described in the words of a medieval hymn:

Mary the Dawn, Christ the perfect Day;
Mary the Gate, Christ the heavenly Way.

Mary the Root, Christ the mystic Vine;
Mary the Grape, Christ the sacred Wine.

Mary the Wheat-sheaf, Christ the living Bread;
Mary the Rose tree, Christ the Rose blood-red.

Mary the Font, Christ the cleansing Flood;
Mary the Chalice, Christ the Saving Blood.

Mary the Temple, Christ the temple's Lord;
Mary the Shrine, Christ the God adored.

Mary the Beacon, Christ the Haven's Rest;
Mary the Mirror, Christ the Vision blest.

Judas

In thinking about Judas I suspect that many of us bring a lot of feelings to this character. The English translations of the gospels refer to him constantly as 'the betrayer'. We may have been betrayers ourselves or we may have been betrayed. If we've been betrayed with a kiss then Gethsemane is a place of wounding for us. And if we've been devastated by someone close taking their own life then Judas is a person painful to contemplate. Perhaps because Judas is the bearer of so much pain he's a figure of constant fascination and from time to time people write about him as if to exonerate him. We cannot bear 'very much reality.'

But those who are sympathetic to Judas have a point and it's rooted in the Greek text of the New Testament. The English word 'betray' is a translation of the Greek verb paradidomi: para meaning 'over' and didomi meaning 'to give': so literally paradidomi means 'to give over' or 'hand on' or 'to transmit' or 'to yield'. 'To betray' takes us into a whole new realm. Yes, Judas does it for the money, according to the gospels, but then in our culture we hand over a lot of things for money. That doesn't turn us into Judases, does it?

So can we get into the mind of Judas? Possibly, if we think about his second name - Iscariot. There's a lot of debate about what Iscariot means. It could be a corruption of Kerioth, a small town in Moab which may have been Judas' hometown. But Iscariot could be derived from the Latin word 'sicarius' meaning 'a dagger': Judas 'the Dagger Man'. Jesus was no respecter of persons in the sense that he kept company with everyone. He was as at ease in the house of Zaccheus the tax collector as he was with Mary washing his feet and drying them with her hair. He mixed with sinners of all sorts. For Jesus terrorists would not have been off-limits.

So perhaps Judas was a terrorist, a zealot. He wanted to get the Romans out of Israel and he was prepared to use violence if necessary. But he wasn't strong enough on his own. He needed a leader, a Messianic figure, and so he found Jesus (or perhaps Jesus found him). Judas would have been impressed by Jesus' capacity to attract a crowd and a following. Phrases like 'the kingdom of God' would have been music to his ears.

But then I can imagine the disillusionment setting in. It was all very well Jesus getting people like Matthew the tax collector on board and (hopefully) making him see the error of his ways collecting taxes from God's own people, the Jews, to pass on to the hated Romans but Jesus seemed to get awfully bogged down with thickos like Peter (a mere fishermen) and these deadbeat needy women like Mary from Magdala. I imagine that Judas the terrorist wanted Jesus to get more people like himself onboard; people who could use a knife, a weapon; strong people who could start a revolution.

The climax came with the entry into Jerusalem - the crowds, the hosannas and then the cleansing of the temple (all well and good but the high priest and his gang were hardly the real enemy) but what next? Where was the uprising? It's fine to overturn the tables of the moneychangers but what about a pitched battle with the Roman legions in the narrow streets of Jerusalem where you can pick off trained soldiers in a guerrilla war street by street? Where was the organization? Where was the fight? Nowhere! All Jesus did was talk about his own death and prepare for Passover. What a waste! Jesus was not the instrument of Judas' plan. Jesus: the Way? No! Jesus was now in the way. He was an obstacle. He was dispensable. He had to be got rid of.

So Judas hands Jesus over. He hands him over to the people who want rid of him - Caiaphas and Pilate and all those vested interests whose power Jesus challenged. Judas handed Jesus over to his cross only to find himself crossed out.

Judas' kiss,
intended to disprove
His master's argument of love,
Confirmed it instead,
as he Discovered,
hanging from a tree.